Les Goddesses / Hemlock Forest

This latest book by New York–based artist Moyra Davey is based on two related projects, Les Goddesses (2011) and Hemlock Forest (2016), which each take form through text, photography, and film. Layering introspection and personal narratives with meditations on the lives and works of other writers, filmmakers, and artists—ranging from 18th-century feminist writer and activist Mary Wollstonecraft to Chantal Akerman, Karl Ove Knausgård, and Davey’s own five sisters—the artist explores such themes as compulsion, artistic production, family, and life and its passing.

It is said that we know more about far-away galaxies than we do about the bottom of the oceans on earth. One could say something similar about our relationship to the future and to the contemporary. The distant future can seem more familiar than the deep present. We know it will come, regardless of whether or not we are around to witness it. Searching for the present is a bit like deep sea diving. How to dive without drowning in the turbulent waters of now? How to find and share sources of illumination in submarine darkness? When to surface and how to ride a strong current? Why stay afloat on the present moment at all? And what to look for while beachcombing the sea-floor of our time? These are some of the questions that Raqs Media Collective address in their account of contemporaneity, guided by a motley collection of figures lost and found in the turbulence of their practice.

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (Rose / Mulvey)

Since it first appeared in Screen in 1975, Laura Mulvey's essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ has been an enduring point of reference for artists, film-makers, writers and theorists. Mulvey’s compelling, structured and polemical analysis of visual pleasure has provoked and encouraged others to take positions, challenge pre-conceived ideas and produce new works that owe their possibility to the generative qualities of this key essay.

In this book, the artist Rachel Rose has produced an innovative work that extends and adds to the essay’s frame of reference. Drawing on eighteenth and nineteenth-century fairy tales, and observing that their flat narratives matched the flatness of their depictions, Rose has drawn a connection between what happened in these illustrations before cinema, and what Mulvey describes in her essay – cinema flattening sexuality into visuality. Rose’s intricately layered work, with its mixing of genres and histories, is a complex and playful reformation.

This title is a unique Two Works book: an artist responds to a key text that has informed their understanding of art and its histories.

The Metaphysics Of Beer: A Symposium Of Humans And Microorganisms

Author:Vytenis BurokasTitle: The Metaphysics Of Beer. A Symposium Of Humans And MicroorganismsPublisher: &editionsSubject: Artists' WritingsStock:✔

Rather than merely cite and quote his research, the artist stages an increasingly drunken discussion between himself and a crowd of philosophers, scientists, and theoreticians. In the play, Burokas ventriloquises, and is inhabited by, a strange constellation of characters who have all dealt with the properties of the clinamen in some way, including the philosophers Aristotle, Epicurus, Lucretius, Julia Annas, and Michel Serres, the scientists Henri Poincare and Ilya Prigogine, and the composers and theorists John Rahn and Michel Dellvile, amongst many other voices. (text by Post Brothers)

Solution 257: Complete Love

Ingo Niermann’s provocative new novel imagines a Berlin alternative to the activist occupation of public spaces in 2011. The completists, gathered at Alexanderplatz, aspire for justice through intimacy. They believe that only when the redistribution of material wealth includes equal chances of finding sex and love—no matter how elderly, disabled, or ugly you are—communism will become real. This volume of the Solution series is a revolutionary erotic fiction.

Karl, a freelance writer and young stay-at-home dad in Berlin, first dismisses the completists as a bunch of as fringe weirdos and burnouts. But over the course of one summer day, his outlook changes after a series of encounters both virtual and physical. Contacting him on Skype, an attractive and mysterious stranger tells him she has only three hours left to live. Their video chat starts a game of seduction and intrigue and turns into a vivid debate on the decorum of modern relationships and fantasies. Instead of satiating him sensually and emotionally, Ava enlightens him about the real completist challenge of justice through sex and intimacy. Karl must join ranks with disabled sex-rights activist Oskar Patzer before his day’s journey—culminating in an improvised public orgy prefaced by a choreographed group performance—can indicate the possibilities for completing love.

Function Follows Vision, Vision Follows Reality

This collection of unpublished or rare texts by Frederick Kiesler written between 1927 and 1957 is published on the occasion of the exhibition 'Function Follows Vision, Vision Follows Reality' at Kunsthalle Wien (May 27–August 23, 2015), curated by Luca Lo Pinto and Vanessa Joan Müller. The exhibition, developed in cooperation with the Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, focuses on Kiesler’s ideas on display, and juxtaposes works of contemporary artists with a number of original drawings by Kiesler. Views of the exhibition are included in the pages of this publication.

Job Interviews

'The ritual of the job interview can be considered as a courtship that’s conditioned by protocols that ask for a quite particular display: with social relations as material, a dance of conformity, the attempted imagining and echoing of expectations.'

The Complete Plays

Guy de Cointet (1934–1983) was fascinated with language, which he explored primarily through performance and drawing. His practice involved collecting random phrases, words, and even single letters from popular culture and literary sources—he often cited Raymond Roussel's novel Impressions of Africa as influential—and working these elements into nonlinear narratives, which were presented as plays to his audience.

Paintings and works on paper would then figure prominently within these performances. In his play At Sunrise . . . A Cry Was Heard (1974), a large painting depicting letters bisected by a white sash served as a main subject and prop, with the lead actress continuously referring to it and reading its jumble of letters as if it were an ordinary script. His drawings likewise are almost readable but just beyond comprehension. De Cointet is recognized as one of the major figures in the conceptual art movement that emerged in Los Angeles in the 1970s, having strongly influenced a number of prominent artists working in southern California, including Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley.

Guy de Cointet: The Complete Plays gathers for the first time all the theatrical works by Guy de Cointet, written between 1973 and 1983. With twenty-five plays in the original French and English and in translation, the book also features commentaries, interviews, and documents relating to their intended design and staging, including notebooks, drawings, photographs, posters, and invitation cards from the archives of Guy de Cointet Estate at the Centre Pompidou's Kandinsky Library in Paris.

Yvonne Rainer. Moving and Being Moved

Edited by Yvonne Rainer, this selection of texts and images by Rainer and various authors, offers a retrospective portrait of her work, focusing on some of her most notable performances and projects from both the late 1960s (‘Trio A’, ‘The Mind Is a Muscle’) and since her return to dance with the White Oak Dance Project in 2000. Rainer is known for her challengingly experimental and sometimes minimalist work as a dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker, which spearheaded the rise of postmodern dance. An essay by Rainer frames things from the perspective of an ageing dancer who is aware of her physical limitations. With a conversation between Rainer and dancer Trisha Brown.

Becoming Palm is the outcome of a conversation between two friends, artist Simryn Gill and antropologist Michael Taussig responding to 'the enormous transformations, human, and ecological, that this crop engenders' (Michael Taussig) in two remote geographical locations, Southeast Asia and South America.

The Joke Book. Collected by Seth Siegelaub

The following material is intended to help you to increase the quality of your life; some are funny, some are serious, some are tasteless, some are ridiculous, but they are, each in their way, helpful.

If you do not wish to continue to receive this stuff, too bad. Comments welcome, nevertheless. Please feel free to forward this.

Somewhere I've Never Been

Can you tell a story of a place in the same fracturing way it was experienced?

Pulling together field recordings from international soundscapes, Somewhere I've Never Been follows the author's account of loss and being alone in a self-started journey through the US, Europe and the Middle East. One part of an expanded narrative on many platforms (more at: http://thepoweroflove.cz/), and against the grain of dominant visual narratives, the book is told through the sounds of corporate expansion and pop cultural hegemony heard in an ever-uneven era of globalisation and cultural mediation.

Drawn away from the music of loaded family pasts and brittle presents to the sprawling inertia of a US road trip, Kretowicz is hooked by Jason Derulo, Fairuz, Harry Partch, Lipgloss Twins, poorly pronounced Polskibus safety announcements, the crucial influence of Celine Dion; in the end pulled back to the jarring patter and endless shifts of London.

I Had Nowhere to Go

In 1944 Mekas and his younger brother Adolfas had to flee from the Nazis for copying leaflets. They were interned for eight months in a labour camp in Elmshorn. The Soviet occupation prevented him from returning to his native Lithuania after the war and, classed as a displaced person, he lived in DP camps in Wiesbaden and Kassel. Towards the end of 1949 he and his brother emigrated to New York. In his autobiography I Had Nowhere to Go he describes his survival in the camps and his arrival in New York. Mekas tells a universal story, that of an emigre who can never go back, whose loneliness in his new world is emblematic of human existence.

The George Kuchar Reader

Despite being a consummate polymath, George Kuchar (1942–2011) is best known as a pioneering underground film and video maker with a disarming do-it-yourself aesthetic and a hilariously eccentric sensibility. Quirky and ingenious, heartfelt and campy, Kuchar’s movies know no boundaries and are an entirely unique development in the history of cinema. The artist’s characteristic instinct for kitsch, his humor and conceptual brilliance, were not confined to the screen alone; they can be glimpsed in all the activities he carried out throughout his life. The George Kuchar Reader, edited by Andrew Lampert, collects a wide swath of previously uncollected and newly unearthed writings and visual work, including essays, comics, drawings, paintings, photographs, film stills, scripts, movie blurbs, correspondence, letters of recommendation for his students, documentation of his UFO sightings, excerpts from his dream journal, selections from his private notebooks and much more.

in memoriam… adds a new score and production by Postcommodity and Alex Waterman to a suite of four early scores by the American composer Robert Ashley. The fifth score honours the lives of Mary Cecil, Victoria Callihoo (nee Belcourt), and Eleanor (Helene) Thomas Garneau, three Indigenous women from territory at the turn of the Century as it became the province of Alberta. This significant addition continues Ashley’s project investigating the connections between musical forms and constructs of historicization, opening a conversation regarding whom and how we memorialize individuals and inscribe their legacies.

[from essay by Candice Hopkins] What histories are remembered and who is doing the remembering? What form do these rememberings take? It is not as simple as taking down one monument and replacing it with another. We need to ask more questions, take note of the voids that stand in for the past, and actively make way for other voices, particularly those are trapped under the ‘sea ice of English’. 'Listen for sounds', writes the Tlingit poet and anthropologist Nora Marks Dauenhauer, 'They are as important as voices. Listen. Listen. Listen. Listen.'

All Books

The cover of the book, as told by the artist himself, is a drawing of him made by his friend about ten years ago envisagaging his look ten years later... which is today !

Collected here for the first time are Liam Gillick’s major fictional texts: McNamara Papers, Ibuka, Discussion Island/Big Conference Centre, The Winter School, with Erasmus is Lateand Literally No Place. Within each history, and the utopias and alternative visions of society envisioned by writers, filmmakers, philosophers, and scientists are presented and speculated on, often through the fictionalised voices of secondary historical characters. Traversing genres of fiction and critical discourse, ideas are explored in a nonlinear, open-ended discursive format, in which the textual structure mirrors the structuring of the presented ideas. In each text Gillick’s concern is to explore complex, paradoxical historical moments and the ideologies that shaped them, reflecting on how the redundant utopian elements of the past continue to structure contemporary society and remain impulses within speculations of our post-utopian future.

Smoking Nurse

Smoking Nurse is the first printed selection of Matt Burt's poetry. Written during the late 90s for his spoken word performances, the pieces were a continuation of his earlier writings, which he recorded on a semi-broken micro-cassette player. These primitive recordings were later sampled by Burt's musician friend Helge Sten, which is how I found out about his work a decade ago. In the early 90s, Sten (later known as Deathprod) encouraged Burt to leave his job as a farm journalist for the second smallest newspaper in Wisconsin, USA, and move to Trondheim, Norway, to study at the local art academy. In 2004, Burt started his own band (Dog & Sky) and since has written and performed spoken word, music, and short stories, as well as collaborated with Norwegian bands like Motorpsycho and Spidergawd. Susanna and the Magical Orchestra covered his song These Days on their Melody Mountain album (Martin Kolhout)

Mr. Peanut Drawings

In 1970, Trasov assumed the identity of Mr. Peanut, donning a handmade paper mache replica of the mascot of the Planters Peanut Company. Soon after, he produced The Mr. Peanut Mayoralty Campaign of 1974, a twenty-day performance developed in collaboration with members of the Vancouver arts community. The legume quickly became Trasov’s cipher and central component of his practice. Mr. Peanut Drawings collects nearly a hundred of Trasov’s Peanut drawings together with a text by Nancy Tousley.

Gerhard Benedikt Friedl: An Approach by Helmut Färber

In An Approach by Helmut Färber, an unpublished text written in 2007, documentary filmmaker Gerhard Friedl (Knittelfeld. A Town without a History, Wolff von Amerongen. Did He Commit Bankruptcy Offences?) describes his experience of Färber’s courses at film school – a method of scrupulous, close analysis at the editing table that also played a crucial role in Harun Farocki’s teaching. Farocki got to know Färber in the 1970s and remained deeply indebted to his thoughts and methods throughout his career.

When Marcos Lutyens arrived in Kassel in the summer of 2012, he didn’t know he would end up staying for the entire 100 days of documenta 13 to perform 340 hypnotic sessions with the audience. Unfolding in the Reflection Room in Kassel’s Karlsaue Park, it was the most involved installment of the Hypnotic Show to date—“an exhibition that exists only in the mind of the audience,” according to Lutyens’s collaborator Raimundas Malašauskas.

Lutyens also didn’t know that he would write a book about it: Memoirs of a Hypnotist: 100 Days, an intimate and hardly qualifiable document. Here, the artist chronicles the Hypnotic Show and puts together all kinds of improbable experiences for his readers: research of cognition and neurological activity, deep exploration of varying states of consciousness, and, at the center, the possibility for contingency and embodied dematerialization within the current thinking of art.